By Mr. T. Gambier Parry. 41 
tightly enouzh, to suit the action of rough times and rough climate ; 
but the interiors were to meet only the gentler action of men’s 
thoughts and men’s prayers. Roughness and refinement are both 
elements of sublimity in art, but they can never change places. 
What would give masculine grandeur to an exterior would mar all 
good effect within. The last touch given to the interior was to soften 
down the asperities of the rough materials. Coarse lines and 
broken joints of mortar confounded the finer forms of architecture. 
A thin film of fine cement resolved those discords, and prepared the 
way forthe colourist. But nowadays colour, whitewash, gesso, and 
allare gone. Architecture, first washed of its dirt, then deprived of 
its complexion, and last of all denuded of its very skin, is presented 
to us ina state of nudity, which we are then called on to admire! 
This ruthless process, besides its effect on countless minor buildings, 
_ has reduced the interior of Lichfield and a great part of Worcester 
Cathedrals to a condition of bare masonry and vaulting, like that 
of a common beer cellar, and has given the two magnificent columns 
which rise from the floor to the roof of the choir of Ely the appear- 
ance of two huge piles of double Gloucester cheeses. These are 
but illustrations. This ruinous process has been the rule of modern 
__ restoration. e 
_ The employment of colour in architecture in the times of 
_ its greatest perfection is now too generally admitted to need 
_ proof or argument. The beauty of a nude colourless architecture 
may be and often is very great; but it needs to be of the highest 
_ art to bear the trial of such nude exposure. Such beauty, the nude 
_ beauty of uncoloured architecture, is of the most abstract kind. 
_ The forms of architecture, and consequently the beauty of their 
composition, have nothing in common with nature. Of course its 
structure has; but I am now speaking of the higher ideal of its 
_ art, not the lower one of its mechanism. That higher ideal is a 
most abstract one. There is an element of beauty in architecture 
_ which surpasses the original conception of the architect. A painter 
_preconceives his work; a sculptor does so, and works it gradually 
into shape in plastic clay; but an architect does not and cannot 
preconceive all the varying effects of perspective and of light. 


